Imagine walking into a gym, basketball in hand, ready for your first practice, when you hear whispering. As you turn, you see a group of your teammates pointing at you and snickering. You don’t know what they are laughing about, but you know it’s about you. As you walk over to them, you hear the words they are saying: “Fat, slow, no good.”

This was my reality during my first basketball practice in 2022. I had been practicing all through the COVID-19 pandemic, and I thought I was good at the game. But at practice, I saw how great my teammates were, and I was very discouraged by how I performed. When our first game came, we won, but I didn’t feel like I had helped. Instead, I felt like I was holding the team back. As the season went on, this feeling only grew stronger. I heard my teammates calling me names from behind my back. When the season finished, my self-confidence was at an all-time low, and I didn’t want anything to do with basketball. My father saw that I was feeling down, so he showed me a video of an amazing basketball game where there was a person with the same large body type as me. After seeing that video, my self-confidence was at an all-time high.

The next season, I was ready to play again with my confidence restored. Later that season, I learned how to set a pick. A pick, also known as a screen, means to stand next to a defender to let your teammate around them. I realized that this was a perfect opportunity for me with my larger body size. I could set great screens to help my team. At our first game, I tried my idea out. I stopped trying to take shots and started to set screens for our team. At first, I wasn’t great at setting screens, but I started putting more practice time into setting screens. In scrimmages at practice, I watched people use screens, and I learned how to stop defenders.

Soon, I started to get a reputation. The words I was hearing stopped being words like fat or slow. Instead, I heard people saying, “He sets the best screens in the league,” and “How do you get around him?” Hearing these comments, my confidence soared. After that season, I was ready for my final season playing for the middle school team. In that season, with my confidence restored, I played better than ever, blocking and passing to my team. We won every game and made it to the championship, where I was fouled while taking a shot and got the chance to take two free throws. I missed both shots, but we still won the game. In the end, I learned that not having the same body size as others doesn’t mean that you are worse at something than them; it just means that you may have a different role to play in the game.

© James . All rights reserved. If you are interested in quoting this story, contact the national team and we can put you in touch with the author’s teacher.